I am looking for an obscure piece of information regarding a ship named Hai Jih. (This may not be her original name) According to a Lloyds Appendix Yard list it was built by Ujina in 1971 as their yard number 516. Her grt is indicated as 3021. My oldest Lloyds Registers date from 1978 and there is no trace of this ship anymore, also not in the Appendix. I cannot find any indication that she may have sunk sometimes during the seventies, (perhaps under another name?) but I assume she disappeared.

Miramar also has no info on this specific yardnumber.

Can anyone, having available an older copy of LR, come up with the original name, Lloyds number and fate? Much appreciated.

Thank you Helmut, seems to be a ship really under the radar. A search with the IMO number on Googles gives no hit at all. Other Ujina built ships around that time have a number starting with 7203 so I am sure it is correct.

Although we use LR No and IMO No interchangeably, it not as simple as that, though they are a common numerical sequence. In 1987 the IMO adopted the already-existing LR numbering system, which had been in the current 7-digit form since 1969. I cannt remember the details of the various corporate changes involving LR, but the part of LR dealing with the IMO contract had morphed into a JV with Fairplay, there was a management buyout, and eventually they sold to IHS.

As I understand it, that structure did not not acquire all the historic data from LR, which continued to publish the Registers in their own name, but the IMO contract did involve acquiring the ship histories and other data for all those ships which were believed to be still extant and thus were acquiring formal IMO numbers. For the IMO contract or for wider commercial purposes they only required data on active vessels and I suppose that is what they got. So it is not surprising to me that IHS data does not contain ships which had already been deleted in the 1970s.

I suspect that IHS are just being a bit loose in describing the number as "invalid", when they are really saying that there has never been a ship with that IMO number, which is correct. Anyway, I will ask LR, though I not sure how quickly they can answer at the moment, not only due to COVID but also because they were already in the middle of a long rebuilding project at LR and a lot of historical material is in storage. Let's see.

Thanks David,So for real historic data we need to fall back on Miramar as IHS does not have these (available)? For what it worth, at the time I was a member of the UN working group on maritime statistics which prepared the adoption of the Lloyds number as the official IMO number.

Unfortunately the answer is not available to remotely-working LR staff at present - it has gone into a pile of outstanding queries awaiting not only the end of COVID-related restrictions, but also access to the old data. It is bookmarked.

Unfortunately the answer is not available to remotely-working LR staff at present - it has gone into a pile of outstanding queries awaiting not only the end of COVID-related restrictions, but also access to the old data. It is bookmarked.

IIRC, the problem with old Lloyds data was that they used the single bookkeeping system. In other words a ship that was scrapped or deleted from the active ships file, never got automatically moved to the dead ships file, because that worked independently.